Richard Harris
Award-winning journalist Richard Harris has reported on a wide range of topics in science, medicine and the environment since he joined NPR in 1986. In early 2014, his focus shifted from an emphasis on climate change and the environment to biomedical research.
Harris has traveled to all seven continents for NPR. His reports have originated from Timbuktu, the South Pole, the Galapagos Islands, Beijing during the SARS epidemic, the center of Greenland, the Amazon rain forest, the foot of Mt. Kilimanjaro (for a story about tuberculosis), and Japan to cover the nuclear aftermath of the 2011 tsunami.
In 2010, Harris' reporting revealed that the blown-out BP oil well in the Gulf of Mexico was spewing out far more oil than asserted in the official estimates. That revelation led the federal government to make a more realistic assessment of the extent of the spill.
Harris covered climate change for decades. He reported from the United Nations climate negotiations, starting with the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, and including Kyoto in 1997 and Copenhagen in 2009. Harris was a major contributor to NPR's award-winning 2007-2008 "Climate Connections" series.
Over the course of his career, Harris has been the recipient of many prestigious awards. Those include the American Geophysical Union's 2013 Presidential Citation for Science and Society. He shared the 2009 National Academy of Sciences Communication Award and was a finalist again in 2011. In 2002, Harris was elected an honorary member of Sigma Xi, the scientific research society. Harris shared a 1995 Peabody Award for investigative reporting on NPR about the tobacco industry. Since 1988, the American Association for the Advancement of Science has honored Harris three times with its science journalism award.
Before joining NPR, Harris was a science writer for the San Francisco Examiner. From 1981 to 1983, Harris was a staff writer at The Tri-Valley Herald in Livermore, California, covering science, technology, and health issues related to the nuclear weapons lab in Livermore. He started his career as an AAAS Mass Media Science Fellow at the now-defunct Washington Star in DC.
Harris is co-founder of the Washington, DC, Area Science Writers Association, and is past president of the National Association of Science Writers. He serves on the board of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing.
Harris' book Rigor Mortis was published in 2017. The book covers the biomedicine "reproducibility crisis" — many studies can't be reproduced in other labs, often due to lack of rigor, hence the book's title. Rigor Mortis was a finalist for the 2018 National Academy of Sciences/Keck Communication Award.
A California native, Harris returned to the University of California-Santa Cruz in 2012, to give a commencement address at Crown College, where he had given a valedictory address at his own graduation. He earned a bachelor's degree at the school in biology, with highest honors.
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People who suffer from prolonged delirium in the hospital are likely to develop long-term mental problems like dementia. Doctors have come up with techniques they say can reduce delirium in the ICU. -
Up to half of all patients who survive emergency medical treatment in the intensive care unit have mental problems when they return home. Doctors studying the problem say it starts with delirium. -
James P. Allison and Tasuku Honjo were cited for their work in harnessing the immune system to arrest the development of cancer. -
Microbe-eating-microbes are found in "almost every ecosystem on Earth," says a defense department scientist who hopes bacteria of this type might one day be deployed to fight human infections. -
The U.S. has the highest rates of sexually transmitted disease cases in the industrialized world, say health trackers, with chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis reaching 2.3 million cases in 2017. -
The consumer advocacy group Public Citizen also says the multicenter study of life-threatening sepsis will at best produce confusing results. A Harvard doctor and designer of the research disagrees. -
Many social sciences experiments couldn't be reproduced in a new study, thus calling into question their findings. The field of social science is pushing hard to improve its scientific rigor. -
HPV testing is now seen as equally effective as Pap tests for cervical cancer screening. An influential federal advisory group has changed guidelines for how women over 30 should get tested. -
Young women with simple pregnancies can safely ask a doctor to induce labor, a study finds. It doesn't increase their risk of needing a C-section after all and can even offer potential benefits. -
The vast amount of data held in electronic medical records and insurance bills contains bits that could be useful in refining the use of approved for drugs. But how to find it?
